vulgarize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make vulgar or coarse; lower; debase.
to vulgarize standards of behavior.
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to make (a technical or abstruse work) easier to understand and more widely known; popularize.
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to translate (a work) from a classical language into the vernacular.
verb
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to make commonplace or vulgar; debase
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to make (something little known or difficult to understand) widely known or popular among the public; popularize
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of vulgarize
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In “Children of Light,” his Hollywood novel, he wrote: “There are people at this table who could vulgarize pure light.”
From New York Times ● Mar. 9, 2020
James Ellroy served as one of two grand masters for the awards, saying, "We are here to vulgarize literature."
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 30, 2015
The waves of vulgarity this picture gave off made me have the strong instinct that he was going to vulgarize the office of the presidency.
From Time Magazine Archive
But broken columns, boxed poems and spots of color and photographs enhance rather than vulgarize.
From Time Magazine Archive
Please don't let the mention of money vulgarize a little friendly act like this.
From Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, 1920-10-06 by Sir Owen Seaman
Things are put a good deal more strongly in the film, although they have not vulgarized but only underscored James’ subtext.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 6, 2018
And, in a vulgarized form Rand would almost certainly reject, they have spread even further since her death in 1982.
From Salon ● Oct. 6, 2014
In a cri de coeur written in retrospect, the Boston architect Rodolfo Machado lamented that the postmodernist critique of Modernism had been misunderstood and vulgarized in kitschy banalities built across the country.
From New York Times ● Aug. 21, 2014
On it he croons in a talky flow about a manuscript — or is it a love letter? this song? his career? — that he fears will be vulgarized by commercial forces.
From New York Times ● Aug. 20, 2011
Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word for it that had not been vulgarized.
From A Crooked Mile by Oliver [pseud.] Onions
That last attraction might sound like a waste of space, a frivolous, vulgarizing touch.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 21, 2021
The original film was made with brazenly mercantile yet artistically sound intentions, and, despite its vulgarizing touches, it’s a crudely effective story about tradition and modernity, misogyny and resistance.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 1, 2019
Have they not already ruined the high aristocracy of thought in vulgarizing education?
From Time Magazine Archive
Or Davy Crockett movies for vulgarizing Tennessee history -- and sentimentalizing bears.
From Time Magazine Archive
This law should be amended to protect it also from the even more sordid and vulgarizing associations to which it is not infrequently submitted on the American musical-comedy stage.
From American Adventures A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' by Wallace Morgan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
